This AI Startup Will Clean Your NYC Apartment for Free—But There's a Catch
An AI startup is offering to clean New York City apartments for free. That's right: While a typical cleaning can easily cost hundreds of dollars, this one comes with no charge at all. All the startup seeks in exchange is permission to record first‑person videos from the perspective of its cleaners as they tidy up your space.
Those videos will be used to train robots to handle everyday chores. The company, called Shift , sends out housekeepers who wear head‑mounted cameras while cleaning. These cameras record the full gig, from scrubbing your bathroom and washing dishes to organizing messes.
The company says the in‑home footage is valuable enough as training data to cover the cost of the cleaning, so customers do not pay for the service as long as they agree to the recording. Cleaners may refuse specific tasks they are not comfortable doing, but the startup actively invites very messy apartments because they provide more varied data.
Shift's parent company, MicroAGI, is based in Germany and focuses on egocentric video datasets for "physical AI" and robotics. In addition to scheduling cleanings through Shift, the company pays people in many countries to record themselves doing repetitive manual tasks and then licenses the processed data to AI and robotics labs.
In New York, that payment takes the form of free cleanings instead of cash. The firm says it anonymizes footage by blurring faces, names, documents, and screens before clients use the data. It also says it will not sell the recordings to advertisers and will only use them to train AI and robots, though it doesn't specify how long it will store data or who within the company can access it.
Interestingly, the company's legal documents note that it is not responsible for any theft, injury, or property damage during cleanings by the cleaners, Gizmodo reports .
